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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/28385466">Where did all our probes go?</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hilarita/pseuds/Hilarita'>Hilarita</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Clangers</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Astronomy, Gen, Outer Space</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-12-28</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-12-28</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-18 03:08:11</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,129</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/28385466</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hilarita/pseuds/Hilarita</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>A scientist blogs about her new paper about some disappearing space probes</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>5</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Where did all our probes go?</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>So there's been a bit of buzz in the press about this. We did our press conference earlier today, and our article's gone live on Nature: Astronomy and on the arxiv. As usual, I'm writing my informal version, for those of you who don't want to look at long tables of numbers, and extremely terse discussions of stats methods and measurement error.</p>
<p>What's all this about? Our paper is snappily titled: "Anomalies in a defined Oort cloud region: detections by five probes." What does that mean? It means something weird was happening in a region of space, and five space probes noticed something there. We still don't know what the thing is. But we do have some good evidence now that the Oort Cloud exists, which is pretty exciting. We've had some good hints for a couple of years now, but we've got some nice confirmation published here.</p>
<p>To get to where we are now, we have to go back 30 years. Voyager 2 stopped transmitting in late 2020. We were a bit surprised (well, I wasn't very surprised. I was still finishing off my PhD and not really paying much attention as such), because Voyager 1 was still just about managing to send back some data. Both Voyagers were sending back less and less data, and their signal was getting fainter. But we were turning off instruments and reducing transmissions and doing a lot of other things to squeeze out as much life as possible. Voyager 2's signal was looking pretty OK, though, &amp; we thought we had several more years of low power operation left. We chalked the loss up to a sudden malfunction, and got on with our lives. </p>
<p>Then, New Horizons went dark in 2022. Coincidentally, it had ended up in about the same region of space as Voyager 2 - that wasn't initially intended, it just worked out that way. New Horizons was much quicker than Voyager 2, so it caught up with the older probe. New Horizon's signal was strong, and there were no power concerns. Its camera was still working, but we didn't see much on there before the signal disappeared - not enough light to see much. We had some variations that indicated there might be rocky bodies, and that thus maybe it had hit a planetismal of some sort. This led to some major speculation about the Oort Cloud, or whether this was a strange exceptional object. Or an instrument malfunction. There were a lot of papers about this. Pity the students that did literature reviews of this stuff.</p>
<p>Now this was a bit more exciting. Two probes missing, in fairly close proximity, and possible evidence of the Oort Cloud. A bunch of space agencies leapt on this and sent probes. Japan launched in 2026 - this was pretty much a record for a space science mission. India launched in late 2028, and the EU in mid-2029. All of them used the latest high-speed propulsion technologies, so they all arrived in the target area pretty quickly. America didn't join in, because it was busy being very distracted by Artemis. </p>
<p>The Japanese probe, Issun, had a pretty standard CCD on it, plus a spectrometer. Because it was using pretty standard tech, it could launch quickly. The Indian probe, Guru, had a visible light camera, and an infrared one. The EU probe, Notre, had radio receivers at 2GHz, 10GHz, 20GHz, with a neat little receiver switching mechanism, and a magnetometer. I was part of the team that designed and built the 10GHz receiver. Yes, all of those probe names are also terrible terrible no-good acronyms. I'm not going to repeat them. You can look them up on Wikipedia, and then agree with me that astronomers should never be allowed to name anything.</p>
<p>So two of our three probes arrived in 2042. Great. And we lost signal from them. Less great, but it was repeatable. We got a few shots from Guru and Issun that also indicated something rocky. We got a few papers out, and a whole lot of questions. There seemed to be some extreme form of radio opacity there. We pointed FAST, SKA, and ngVLA at it. We saw some signals at 20GHz, but nothing above the 3 sigma level, so it was worth following up on, but not really publishable. Was there some spinning radio source inside a dust cloud? But we weren't really seeing the dust. The theorists were going wild. String theory came back into popularity at some universities, but a lot more people thought that it was like pulsars - something we'd observed but didn't understand. Or it was an error in our data processing, or in the instrument itself. (More papers, more arguing, more extremely bored grad students reading those papers.)</p>
<p>Then Notre arrived in 2047. It got a few of those 20GHz signals, and there seemed to be an intense magnetic field for a few seconds. Then Notre stopped transmitting for 15 minutes. (While usually at that range we'd not transmit all the time, we'd deliberately set Notre to transmit constantly once it got close, in case it saw something before it went dark.) </p>
<p>When Notre came back, so did the other four probes. This caused the wires to light up between NASA, ESA, Japan, India, and indeed a lot of other places. All five probes were back online within 15 minutes of each other. Voyager 2 was very faint, but still there. This allowed us to locate the region of space very precisely - in the nearest reaches of where we expected the Oort Cloud to be, just past the heliopause. </p>
<p>That was weird enough. Five probes disappearing in a very small region of space, then reappearing within five minutes of each other in that very same region. Weirder yet: they all ended up on different courses and trajectories from those they were on originally. It was as if they'd stood still for some time - minutes for Notre, decades for Voyager 2 - and then come back and gone off in new directions. </p>
<p>We did get a bit of data of that region: we got some more pictures of something rocky, and we got some metallic spectra off one body. No more magnetic field, but plenty of 20GHz radio transmission, with the same random durations we were spotting with the radio telescopes. Our best guess is a strong radio-opaque region (but without dust - we've seen no signs of dust), with a spinning radio source inside it, with some means of trapping probes temporarily.  Also, we're pretty definite now that the Oort Cloud exists. The press are saying "aliens" every other word. It's never aliens (though one day it will be!), but it's something extremely weird, strange, new. Stay tuned for more research in this area over the next few years!</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>This is based off the new Clangers episode "Hello".<br/>I believe that the Oort Cloud is a potential location for the Clangers' planet. It appears to be in our galaxy, but outside the Solar System.<br/>Of course, New Horizons and Voyager 2 ended up going to different places, but I needed an explanation for why so many probes ended up on the Clangers' planet, so I took a tiny little bit of liberty with reality. Also I have made miracles happen with the speed in which space probes are launched. (Unless they're cubesats, that is.)</p></blockquote></div></div>
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